Le Monde Informatique reports that the website of the Elysée Palace, the official residence of the French president is taking a step towards open data. In a tweet on 16th September, it announced it was opening up its data in a new open data section of its website.
At present this open data section consists essentially of the diary of President François Hollande which has been appearing since last December at the top of the site’s home page in the form of a timeline. The data in this timeline are offered in two formats: XML and JSON.
The Elysée is also releasing the origin of visits made to its website during the previous week in JSON format. Some 41% of its visitors originate from Google, 30% reach the site directly, 8% are referred by Twitter and 4% by the Elysée’s Facebook page. There are also daily statistics for the site’s servers (energy consumption, load) and visits displayed in graphical form: number of visitors, number of pages viewed per hour and the source of visits.
Since the announcement of the the French government’s open data portal data.gouv.fr in February 2011, several public sector organisations, publicly-owned companies (e.g. SNCF and RATP) and local and regional authorities have opened up some of their data.